I believe that these discussions can server as valuable information for new players, in the days of the old forums when I was a newbie, I learned much about burning wheel by reading threads that came before. I like to believe that discussions we have now will help new players in the future.
My intention (I am trying to avoid using “intent” outside of its rules meaning), is mostly to clarify what I see as best practices for those that come after. Perhaps this is a bit presumptuous of me.
I do not mean to ascribe intention onto you. I do not know what your intend. I also in my previous post described a perfectly innocent scenario in which the player really did only have the intent to let the ritual be performed, and no deliberate, second intent, it just arose organically out of their cool description.
I don’t think I have disagreed with this either.
If you wish to have a man take up arms, giving a speech about honor and duty will have meaningful effects on the fiction compared to browbeating him and calling him a coward.
The intent is the same but the task changes the fiction.
If you describe your intent and task as you did here:
I agree, the man is wrestled to the ground. But the GM MIGHT think that because your stated intent was only “to prevent him from interfering with my friend completing the ritual”, that you subduing him was just for that brief moment, that the wrestling was an ongoing act and while you DID subdue him, you did not do so indefinitely, and that it only lasting as long as the ritual was perfectly in line of your intent.
You might argue “but I said I subdue him, if he struggles afterwards and can still break free that is not him being subdued!” but that, I think, is a semantics argument, not a rules one, a semantics argument I am INCLINED to take your side one, but not to the point where I can’t see how a reasonable person might take the other side on.
But if you had CLARIFIED either when stating your initial intent “I want to subdue him and have him at my mercy to stop him from disrupting the ritual”, or after stating your task “So he’d be pacified, right?”. The GM knows more clearly what you want! You reduce the ambiguity of the situation considerably, the GM knows what is significant to you the player, and what is color. You are reducing the mental overhead of your fellow player and not relying on them interpreting you perfectly.
If both players understand each other quite well and what is meant, is your example more than sufficient?
I would say so, but, even if your own hypothetical, it WASN’T sufficient. The GM did NOT grasp based on your description of the task, that him being completely subdued so much so that he was still in that state AFTER the ritual was what you were intending to establish by your task. And there is the disconnect.
In terms of best practices in general, I would look at page 116 to 117 of the codex where Luke basically goes “Yeah we don’t announce failures before the roll that often at BWHQ, but it is mostly because we’re in a good space where we can get away with that, it probably still is best practice to do it.” And this is what I would say is one of those similar things. By not making that additional action explicit in the intent, you are relying on the GM to get what you mean and what your task actually looks like and agree on the logical results of it. If you are playing with your friends and you can rely on them to grok you when you do that, more power to you. But if you are a NEW player, or you find you are having difficulties with this sort of thing regularly, making sure all your “meaningful narrative effects” ARE enumerated in your intent, it becomes EASIER (not guaranteed, your GM can still meaningfully misinterpret your intent) to avoid these kinds of things.
Doing my best 